Integrated circuits include devices, such as transistors, and structures, such as trenches. These devices and structures are manufactured using processes, such as annealing, chemical vapor deposition and plasma vapor deposition, that control physical parameters such as temperature and pressure in a processing environment. Products manufactured using these processes often contain defects that can be difficult to detect. The difficultly comes from the fact that the failure rate for a particular device or structure may be within the expected failure rate for the devices or structures manufactured using these processes, despite the fact that a new failure mechanism is causing new defects.
Even after identifying new defects in a device or structure, applying models of the manufacturing processes for integrated circuit devices and structures often does not provide sufficient information to connect the device and structure failures or defects to a particular process. Thus, precisely identifying a failing process and how the failing process contributes to a device or structure defect is a difficult problem. Attacking and solving this type of problem is part of the inventive process in the integrated circuit manufacturing art. One method of attacking this problem includes using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to identify defects in an integrated circuit. The examination of a photomicrograph produced using an SEM can yield visual information that is often helpful in identifying a defective or failed process. However, even after identifying defects and sources of the defects, new or modified methods and manufactures must be devised to produce defect free devices and structures. For these and other reasons there is a need for the present invention.